


Constellations

by CosmicZombie



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: 1950s, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Detectives, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-08
Updated: 2015-08-08
Packaged: 2018-04-13 15:56:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4528206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CosmicZombie/pseuds/CosmicZombie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s 1950, and in the aftermath of World War Two, detective Thomas Barrow finds that his work is both the cure and antagonist of his loneliness— until he is assigned to work with the notoriously impossible DC Jimmy Kent, and suddenly finds himself re-evaluating his whole world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Constellations

**Author's Note:**

> New fic! Ahhhhh, I'm super excited for this. It should be around 15-20 chapters, I think. I very much hope you enjoy it!! Feedback makes me very happy, and I'd love to know what you think especially of this first bit :D
> 
> Massive thanks to Linkworshipper for endless enthusiasm, invaluable beta-ing, reminding me that Beatles and Beetles are different things entirely, and for just generally being the best. I couldn’t have done it without you! <3 <3

_Preface_

 

October had come early that year, with a bitterness that unsettled the bloodless leaves and rain that was too salty to wash them away. Thomas had only been standing outside his Ford Anglia for a few moments, but already the water had begun through the dense wool of his coat, making the material heavy and uncomfortable where it weighed damply on his shoulders. He narrowed his eyes in attempt to see through the rain, but droplets clung coldly to his eyelashes, filming his vision and giving everything a slightly blurred quality, like a photograph that hadn’t finished being developed.

 

Overhead, the Yorkshire sky was bleak: the rain was so heavy that Thomas could hear nothing beyond the hush of it soaking into the verge where he stood. Through it, he dimly made out a cluster of sombre, black activity a few feet away, at the bend of the road which was awash with the amber of curling, wet leaves that gave the impression it was brimming with doused flames.

 

Thomas tugged his coat more closely around himself, his breath unfurling into the chill as though he was still smoking the cigarette he’d stubbed out before switching off the Ford’s motor. He slammed the cur shut and, bracing himself against the driving rain, made his way swiftly towards the solemn huddle at the verge which was isolated by police cordons. No one threw Thomas much more than an obligatory nod as he approached, but the little hub of activity moved aside to let him through.

 

He could smell the telltale scent of blood and petrol mingling with the rain before he even reached the body.

 

The man was blonde. Mud and dried blood encrusted loose waves of hair, turning it a dirty, indistinct colour where it straggled into the grass. His eyes were open, disquietingly blue amidst the austerity of the rain and the red staining his bedraggled clothes. Bleakly, Thomas wondered if their final glimpse of the world had been the vast and incomprehensible grey of the sky overhead, or if they had ceased to see before the man even hit the ground.

 

A tentative cough to his left, which Thomas recognised as belonging to PC Mason, interrupted his reflections. He did not look up from his study of the body as the younger man began to brief him, stumbling apprehensively over his words: “Mornin’, sir. The body was found early this mornin’ by a lady who was out cyclin’ on her way to work— Mrs. Nugent, she was called. We took a statement, but she was awful shaken up, poor girl. Bates can’t say much yet other than that the time of death would have been at least eight hours ago. Lovely lady, that Mrs. Nugent. You know, even though she was so upset, she gave me back my handkerchief and everythin’ and said thank you.”

 

So not the grey of the sky that they reflected, then. _Just nothing at all_ , Thomas mused bitterly. He snapped his gaze away from the empty blue eyes whose last vision had been of a black sky devoid of stars and full of rain. Instead, he was met by the naïve hazel eyes of PC William Mason, a world apart from those of the dead man.

 

“Once you’re done fawning over a snotty tissue, do you think you could tell me something that’s actually useful?” Thomas sneered, pulling on his gloves.

 

The constable’s reply was a bit too quick, trepidation evident in the way that he blurted, “His name was Matthew, sir. Matthew Crawley,” while his eyes followed Thomas’ motions in a manner akin to watching an unpredictable spider. “At least,” he added, when he seemed sure that Thomas wasn’t going to strike, “According to an unsigned letter that was found in his pocket. It’s getting checked down at the station now, sir.”

 

“What time was he found?” Thomas enquired curtly, crouching down beside the body. Mud flecked the man’s face like freckles, and his blue lips were parted slightly, as though he was about to say something.

 

“Six— six fifteen I believe, sir,” PC Mason offered nervously.

 

Thomas did not look up from where he was observing the marks in the mud beside the body, tracing them lightly with his index finger. A brilliantly amber maple leaf curled damply around the stiff, bloodied fingers of the body, as though it was trying to merge him with the earth already.

 

“A little early to be cycling to work, don’t you think?” Thomas remarked coolly after a moment, moving on to inspect the tiny little shards of glass that peppered the soaked body like a constellation of broken-up stars. He could feel the slight scrape of them against the latex of his gloves as he lightly traced the torn fabric, wondering why they were absent from the man’s discoloured blonde hair.

 

“Oh— yes. I suppose it is, sir,” came PC Mason’s anxious response somewhere above where Thomas was bending over the body, his voice mixed in with the rush of rain soaking into the already muddy grass.

 

“Then why didn’t you press her about it?” Thomas demanded, standing up and looking at the constable, who visibly recoiled. His grip tightened on the slightly soggy notebook he was holding, as though it was a talisman that would protect him against Thomas. “Were you too busy staring at her to do your job?”

 

“It— it wasn’t me who took the statement, sir,” PC Mason stammered, clearly anxious to make this fact known to Thomas as quickly as possible. “It was DC Kent.” He didn’t add anything to this admittance, but he didn’t need to— everyone in the Yorkshire division knew who DC Jimmy Kent was, whether or not they’d worked with him. Having only been out of uniform for three months, Jimmy Kent had already gained a reputation as being absolutely impossible to work with. He was arrogant and obstructive, and seemed to have the ability to turn even the most amiable DIs against him.

 

“Where is DC Kent now?” Thomas raised his eyebrows, not taking his gaze from the constable’s face or betraying any sign of reaction at what William Mason had just told him.

 

“I— I’m not rightly sure, sir.”

 

“Well, _find_ him,” Thomas said ominously, watching how the constable swallowed twice in quick succession. Ignoring William’s anxious expression, he returned to study the deep gashes the wheels of the crashed car had made in the verge a few metres away from where the body lay, surrounded by people who were too late. The mud oozed from them in glutinous bubbles, like blood from a fatal wound. “Were there any possessions on the body besides this unsigned letter?” Thomas added as an afterthought, still studying the tracks. He could tell that PC Mason was still hovering nearby by the sound of pencil on paper.

 

“Just a wallet, sir. There wasn’t much in it, though. There was a bit of paper with an address on it, I think,” PC Mason replied hastily, flipping through the pages in his damp notebook.

 

“Let’s see them, then,” Thomas instructed in clipped tones, still not taking his eyes from the muddy imprints of the car’s wheels that had cut through the verge. Something about them made him uneasy, and the rain didn’t help: it blurred everything beyond recognition.

 

PC Mason shifted uncomfortably again, anxiety evident in his tone when he spoke again: “I— I don’t have them, sir.”

 

“Then who does?” Thomas demanded, cold incredulity palpable in his voice as he looked up at William in disbelief.

 

“DC Kent has them, sir.”

 

“Then I _highly_ suggest you find DC Kent this moment,” Thomas advised coldly, his tone cutting through the rain and any doubt the constable might have about his seriousness. “For your sake as well as his.”

 

PC Mason nodded wordlessly and departed, still clutching the notebook, the pages of which had become warped by the rainfall, distorting all the facts within them. Thomas looked back towards the body, which had been equally distorted by the torrential rain. With a terse sigh, Thomas stuck his hands in the pockets of his coat and turned around, casting his gaze across the surroundings and then back towards where the car had collided with the bank several feet from where the body lay, cold and unmoving. Even if he’d survived the initial impact, no one would have heard his cries for help all the way out in the rambling Yorkshire countryside in the depths of night. It would have been a grim place to die, Thomas mused, with nothing but the feel of the hard, rough concrete and the knowledge you would never feel anything more.

 

Having worked with the police force for over a decade, Thomas was more than used to seeing the dead. He found that it no longer had any great impact on him, but wasn’t sure if the reason for this was due to simply having grown accustomed to it, or if it was because he had gradually come to the conclusion that there appeared to be more suffering in life than in death. The one thing he had never been able to get over had nothing to do with death itself, but rather how many people seemed to die in such pointless ways – their lives no more than loose change, spent on nothing or gambled away.

 

Thomas fleetingly wondered if the man with the eyes who reflected a sky they had never seen had fought in the war where everyone’s deaths had felt pointless. Despite all of Thomas’ years on the force investigating the last movements of the dead, life had never seemed as wasted as it had in the war, where inches could mean the difference between life and death, and information was as deadly as bullets.

 

Slowly, Thomas moved away from the little hub of sombre black around the site of the body, letting the sound of voices get washed away by the rain until there was nothing but the sound of his own footsteps squelching across the muddy leaves and the rain pouring down, catching on the dying leaves and shattering as they hit the road, as if they were made of glass. As he approached the mangled car, it became evident that if nothing else, Matthew Crawley had not been short of money.

 

The forest green Aston Martin that had collided with the overhanging bank was in mint condition save for the scrapes along its paintwork and shattered windscreen, which had clearly happened when it had veered of the road. After a brief inspection of the scratches to the passenger door, Thomas glanced back towards the body, noting that it was further than he might have predicted for it to have been thrown from the car upon collision. What would have caused Matthew Crawley to veer off the road, anyway? Admittedly, the crash had occurred on the bend of the road, but it was not a sharp bend and the car had swerved in the wrong direction for that to have been the case anyway.

 

Lost in thought, Thomas stepped forward to inspect the damage to the windscreen, feet crunching on the glass jigsaw pieces that matched the shards he’d seen on Matthew Crawley’s body. Somehow, it was that which turned his stomach for the first time since he’d arrived on the scene. A cold, bleak weight settled in his chest and he suddenly longed for the cigarettes in his coat pocket.

 

“Barrow?”

 

Thomas turned around from his inspection of the shattered windscreen to find the pathologist, John Bates, standing before him with the seemingly neutral expression of slight contempt that never seemed to alter. Thomas tried not to let his mouth curl into a sneer at the sight of him, and merely arched his eyebrows slightly in invitation to the information he knew Bates was about to impart.

 

“It’s hard to say for certain at this stage, but I believe cause of death was head trauma— almost certainly when he was flung from the car,” Bates intoned coolly in his usual, taciturn manner.

 

“Almost certainly?” Thomas repeated cuttingly, scrutinizing Bates’ typically unreadable expression. The rain had begun to fall more unpredictably under the cover of the fading larch trees, coming in huge, cold droplets that dribbled in icy rivulets down the back of Thomas’ neck, soaking into the itchy fabric of his shirt and making it stick uncomfortably to his skin. “And it’s Detective Inspector Barrow to you, in case you’d forgotten.”

 

“It’s not an easy thing to forget considering how it came about,” Bates replied tersely, his expression unreadable. “It’s too early to completely rule everything else out,” he continued ambiguously, pulling off his gloves. “He has multiple injuries, presumably from the glass of the windscreen.”

 

“How long will it take for the results of the post-mortem?” Thomas ached to light up a cigarette, but he knew the torrential rain would make it impossible.

 

“I should have more for you tomorrow,” Bates replied, with an annoying lack of reaction to Thomas’ curt tone. He was never anything less or more than polite. “But some of it may take longer, possibly four to five days.”

 

“Anything to suggest a suspicious death?” Thomas asked, this time not bothering to hide the irritation in his voice. “Or is that beyond you?”

 

“It’s hard to say at present. In terms of the body, nothing I can see as of yet— there is possibly less blood than I might expect, but that could well be because of the rain. The body is slightly further than I would have expected it to be from the vehicle too. Either he was driving extremely fast or perhaps crawled a few metres from where he landed if he was still alive. Forensics are on their way to go over the car now; I expect you’ll have more news then,” Bates said brusquely. He buttoned up his coat and departed without bidding Thomas goodbye, leaving him standing alone by the shattered vehicle.

 

Thomas stared at it for several moments, before the craving for a cigarette became too great. He strode back towards the huddle around the body in search of the constable he’d spoken to earlier. Unable to locate PC Mason, he turned to the nearest uniform who he recognised with a familiar wave of irritation as PC Moleslay.

 

“Has anyone seen Constable Mason?” he asked, trying to keep the impatience out of his voice. “He was meant to find me DC Kent.”

 

“I think he headed back to the station with a couple of the others,” PC Moleslay offered helpfully. The rain plastered his hair to his head, and although his nose was red from the cold, he offered Thomas a wide smile.

****

Thomas did not return it. “I’ll head back to the station, in that case.”

 

“Good day to you then, sir,” Moleslay said, entirely too cheerfully for Thomas’ taste. He nodded curtly in response and braced himself against the rain, striding back towards where his car was parked, fumbling in his pocket for the keys with wet hands.

 

The car’s interior was somehow colder than it had been outside, and Thomas shivered as he pulled out the half empty carton of cigarettes from his jacket. The rain that had stuck his shirt collar to his skin and soaked through the dense wool of his coat was drumming deafeningly on the windscreen as Thomas lit his cigarette, the smell of fresh smoke emphasising the underlying stale scent of petrol and endless cigarettes.

 

Exhaling in a cloud of smoke, Thomas tapped his fingers restlessly against the steering wheel, staring out at the pouring rain that drummed down relentlessly on the car. Something about the body had troubled him, but he could not place exactly what it was. He could feel the beginnings of a headache coming on as he took another deep drag of his cigarette, mind brimming with questions about the potential Matthew Crawley.

 

Thomas had spent the majority of his ten years at the Yorkshire police division torn between loving and hating his job. He loved it because it consumed him, but also hated it because it simultaneously reminded him that he had nothing else left. Thomas’ job was both the cure and the antagonist of his loneliness. It was the excuse he gave himself for the fact that the only thing that greeted him in his stark basement flat were two military medals which he had not earned and photographs of people who he hadn’t spoken to for years and never would again. He felt he belonged in his own home about as much as he’d belonged in the soldier’s uniform that had always been cut too tightly and still hung at the back of his wardrobe, heavy with dust.  

 

The war had ended five years ago, but Thomas still couldn’t forget. He wondered if any of them ever would. Sometimes he wished he had been one of the ones who had died in warfare, rather than left with years worth of secrets and information no one else knew and no one ever could.

 

Ignoring the heavy weight that had settled in his chest, Thomas took a last drag of his cigarette before opening the door and flicking the end out into the puddle at the side of the road. Turning the keys in the ignition, he exhaled the last of the smoke from his lungs as he pulled out into the road, away from the crime scene, and off in the direction of the station to find DC Jimmy Kent.

 

 

…

 


End file.
